Dems say Obama backtracking on land preservation

Key Democrats in Congress are claiming that President Obama is backtracking on his previous support for government programs that preserve wildlife, wetlands and farms.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, are expressing frustration that Obama wants to reduce funding for land conservation programs after he has backed other conservation efforts.

{mosads}Obama, when he was a member of the Senate last year, voted for a bill creating farming programs and setting new funding levels for existing ones. And earlier this year, Obama signed a long-stalled massive lands bill into law.

A spokesman for the Senate Agriculture Committee said that Harkin has “consistently been opposed to cuts in conservation funding and to mandatory programs in the 2008 farm bill.”

“[Harkin] worked very hard to include conservation funding in the final version of the farm bill — a farm bill that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support — and is opposed to undoing these key investments at this time,” said Grant Gustafson, the spokesman for Harkin’s panel.

DeLauro, the chairwoman of the House Appropriations subcommittee considering Obama’s proposed agriculture budget, said that she is “concerned about some apparent inconsistencies” between Obama’s plan and his stated commitment to land conservation.

“The budget proposes very heavy cuts, in my view, to popular and effective programs such as the Wetlands Reserve Program, Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program [and] the Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program,” she said during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on the president’s budget plan last week.

Asked about the lawmakers’ criticism of Obama’s proposed cuts, the White House referred The Hill to the Department of Agriculture. A department spokeswoman didn’t respond to phone calls seeking comment.

{mosads}When unveiling his budget amid the ailing economy, Obama stressed that he and members of Congress would need to make some sacrifices on certain government programs.

The proposed cuts would add up to a tiny fraction of the president’s $3.6 trillion budget proposal. For instance, Obama’s budget seeks to reduce funding for the Wetlands Reserve Program by $27 million, to $391 million in 2010. The budget would cut funding for the Wildlife Habitat Initiatives Program by more than half, but the cut would save just $43 million.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said last week that the administration plans to conserve more land at a lower cost by putting money in the programs that farmers actually enroll in.

“So essentially, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to match the budget with reality in the field and trying to match the budget with the number of acres that we actually will see enrolled,” Vilsack said.

He pointed out that the Agriculture Department in recent years has set aside funding for the conservation of at least 150,000 wetland acres annually in the Wetlands Reserve Program, even though that program only reached that target once in the past five years.

Under the new policies, the amount of land conserved will increase next year by about 15 percent, to 280 acres, Vilsack said.

Republicans are also critical of Obama’s plan.

Rep. Tom Latham (R-Iowa) said he’s worried that the Obama administration is steering the funds to people as opposed to the lands that need to be conserved the most.

“The Wetland Reserve Program is a critical program to act as buffer zones to keep our rivers and creeks clean and water purified before they go down the rivers, so I don’t understand that,” he said.

{mosads}“You’re basically diverting that money into more funding of people rather than getting more acres into it,” Latham added. “I think it’s short-sighted.”

The resistance on Capitol Hill to proposed cuts to land conservation programs comes in the wake of widespread criticism to other parts of Obama’s agriculture budget. Key farm-state Democrats in the Senate have said they would block Obama’s plan to end direct subsidies to farmers with more than $500,000 in sales. House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) went so far as to call Obama’s proposal a “stupid idea” and deemed it “dead on arrival.”

Democrats and Republicans have also shunned the president’s plan to limit itemized deductions for wealthy earners, a move Obama said would save more than $300 billion and help pay for healthcare reform.

Still, Democrats have rallied behind Obama’s overall plan, passing a budget resolution that commits to addressing his top priorities of healthcare, energy and education reform. The difference between Congress’s resolution and Obama’s budget is that the lawmakers haven’t spelled how they would pay for the ambitious agenda.

Rep. Jack Kingston (Ga.), the top GOP member on the House Appropriations subcommittee reviewing Obama’s agriculture budget, said he was skeptical about the president’s proposed changes to land conservation programs but open to some of them.

He said that lawmakers on both sides will look to work with Vilsack on farm funding.

“If he has thought of something that we have not looked at in the past, I think we should work with him to see if this can be done,” Kingston told The Hill.